Saturday, July 11, 2015

The release version of Word for Mac 2016 was provided to Office 365 subscribers July 9. My initial tests indicate there is still no support for RTL scripts like Arabic (letters are disconnected), but Devanagari seems to work if you use Apple's Kohinoor font.

A list of the Proofing Tools included can be found here. I think its accuracy is suspect, since it includes Persian (for which input is definitely not supported) and several Indic scripts (Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil).

For Arabic/Persian there is a kludge workaround which may meet the needs of some users described here.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

The iBooks Author 2.3 version released June 19 includes 2 new templates for the creation of ebooks in the epub 3 format. This is important because the iBookstore requires that books in a number of languages use that format (and not the .ibooks format that was the only option in earlier iBA versions). Also epub 3 format can normally be read on a variety of platforms, unlike the .ibooks format which is restricted to Mac.